Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West

The Feds in the Forests

The Feds in the Forests T he Forest Service came to the Blues in the first decade of the twentieth century with the best of intentions: to save the forest from the scourges of industrial logging, fire, and decay. When they looked at the Blues, they saw two things: a "human" landscape in need of being saved because it had been ravaged by companies and the profit motive, and a "natural" landscape that also needed saving because it was decadent, wasteful, and inefficient. Not only were federal foresters going to rescue the grand old western forests from the timber barons, they were going to make them better. Using the best possible science, they would make the best possible forests for the best of all possible societies: America in the brand new twentieth century. But instead of an orderly and efficient forest, what resulted was forest chaos. For all their mistakes, the federal foresters were doing something revolutionary: they were trying to come up with a different vision of the human role in natural history. Nearly all the whites who had preceded foresters to the Blues felt that they had stepped into a pristine wilderness-an unchanging place empty of all meaningful human influence. If the forest was a collection of separate parts, then people could either admire these parts or remove them. But they did not have to imagine themselves as participants in a history of relationships and interconnected effects. The foresters changed this by trying to see the forest as a complex web of indirect effects-with human actions as part of that web. In 1900, federal forest inspectors came to the Blues to determine whether the forests were valuable enough to be withdrawn from the public domain and placed in the new forest reserve system. Rumors immediately spread of a railroad that would open up ac86 THE FEDS IN THE FORESTS 87 cess to stands of ponderosa pine. Within a week, speculators came into the region by the hundreds from Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota . Arace between the government inspectors and the speculators began, with the inspectors' work driven by a conviction that land thieves were scouting the Blues for the best government forest land, which they would claim and strip of timber. But at the same time, the Oregonian accused the government inspectors of working in league with the speculators. It was a frenzied, chaotic time, as speculators tried to claim land before the government withdrew it, and everyone suspected everyone else of being a spy for the other side.! The government's attempt to establish forest reserves in the Blues sparked an immediate and intense controversy over land fraud. The Forest Lieu Land Clause, an element of the Organic Act of 1897, allowed homesteaders to select lands from the public domain in lieu of any lands they had within the reserve boundaries before the reserve was declared. Although the purpose of this clause was to protect citizens against unfair seizure of private property , the result in the Blues was a series of scandals that made many Oregonians intensely hostile to the forest reserve system. When the forests of the Blues were first being inspected for potential withdrawal as forest reserves in 1900, administrators in the Land Office leaked information on a proposed forest withdrawal outside of Baker City-the Blue Mountain Forest Reserve. Lieu land speculators paid their employees to file homestead claims on the land two days before the reserve inspectors arrived, and then the speculators forged a petition calling for a reserve on the land they had just claimed. Most of the Signers were supposedly local citizens , but turned out to be, as one official put it, "barflies and roustabouts ." Once the reserve lands were withdrawn, the speculators were able to choose land they liked outside the reserves, in good agricultural territory that was worth more than the land they had just claimed, but had already been closed to ordinary homestead entries. Several types of speculation were common. Legally, a homesteader could buy land at the market price (if any was available) or could file a 160-acre claim on public land and then either "im- 88 THE FEDS IN THE FORESTS prove" that land for five years and own it outright or buy it for $1.25 an acre after six months. The latter was a popular option with bona fide settlers, because once they owned the land, they could mortgage it...